Check us out. Here I am with Chris Stang and Andrew Steinthal – music biz players by day, restaurant critics (and future TV personalities) by night. If you’re looking for vegan restaurant reviews, well you’ll only find one from them so far (but of course… Pure Food and Wine, review here). But… if you love restaurants (and never get out to new ones like me) or are just looking for a good place for drinks, their website is my go-to site to find out where to go (immaculateinfatuation.com!). They’re straight up, funny, and they post pix of all the stuff they consume. In many cases, alarming indeed. Here are a couple standouts: a lovely fatty slab of pig fat, and farther below, something fried and smothered in a saucy something in between two white flour butter biscuits.

slab o' fatty bacon sandwich?

So, turns out eating all this food nightly has left these guys feeling a bit less than excellent. (Really? Shocking!) Enter One Lucky Duck! Here’s what I got a few weeks ago in an email with the subject title “Diet. Help.” It went something exactly like this: “Sarma. We feel like fat fucks, eating way too much pork and drinking way too much… So, we’re looking to do a cleanse.” They wanted to start with a juice cleanse… isn’t everyone talking about juice cleanses? Really… I’m no expert, but I’d worry about their poor bodies on a juice cleanse straight away. Maybe for their second cleanse. But given what they’re used to, it’s my opinion that eating totally clean, fresh, organic, raw and vegan food would be a happy enough shock to their systems. Plus, even though they called themselves fat, and they eat tons of fatty pork, I detected no obvious bulging pork bellies on either of these two. So they don’t need shed pounds. (Seriously, how they eat all that food regularly and are not big fat Oompa Loompas is beyond me).

what IS this??

The Immaculate Infatuation boys (I call them boys b/c I’m a good eight years older, practically their Mom!) agreed to let me prescribe their intake for a week. And it’s not Spartan! Lots of fresh juice… lots of salads, filling foods like our fresh guacamole n chips, lasagna, snacks, all our good One Lucky Duck cookies and more. With a few Pure Food and Wine dinners thrown in for good measure.

Here we are on Day One… Andrew and Chris arrive to pick up their first day’s worth of food, and I explain what they’ll be having. Little did I know we’d be filming, or I might have washed my hair, or showered. (And if you need more enticement to watch, Leon my lovepiglet makes a cameo… blog post all about him to come soon! But of course!). OK, also I have no clue how to embed video so forgive the sloppy giant copy n paste below:

To see their full first post on their Immaculate Infatuation site on their brave adventure, click here.

And here’s some of what they ate during Day One.

Yum Vanilla Crispies n Almond Milk

YAY! Feeding people good stuff makes me happy! One Lucky Duck Vanilla Crispies (ohhh yes, u can get them shipped to you anywhere, of course, cllick here) they liked, calling them Vegan Frosted Flakes. I think they also dug the Taco Salad, (below left) but not so much the burger they also got (hey, when you’re comparing it to Shake Shack… ).

Taco Salad

While they eat at nice restaurants, and I think generally stay away from fast food, I still feel like what they put themselves through is a bit like an haute version of Morgan Spurlock on McDonald’s. Maybe? I know they eat vegetables… but I usually read about something like brussel sprouts fried in pork fat, or romaine lettuce topped with sausage crumble? Glad there’s some lettuce there. But what can this do to their poor young bodies!? And I won’t even go into all the rest of it: unhappy worldly eco-consequences, not so lucky ducks, etc…. but, I’m just happy to see what we can do to make these guys feel less like fat fucks and more like sprightly and heroic 30 year olds. Did I mention they loved the mallomar? If nothing else, I’m thinking I’ve got them on dessert. They’re apparently big fans of our almond butter cup ice cream too. And Tuesday night? Dinner at the restaurant. Whatever they want. Does this sound like a rough cleanse?

Mallomar!

I want these guys to feel better, and not hungry, and not missing Shake Shack burgers too badly. That’s my mission. Good times. If they want to take it farther, we can take it to all-juice levels… (then we’ll throw in some colonics and it’ll really be a party). To read their first entry on their raw cleanse adventure, click here. To follow them on Twitter (highly recommended), and get timely updates and twitpics of what they’re eating this week, click here.

Stay tuned for more. Love, Sarma

(p.s. That part in the video about my eating nothing but pork and drinking whiskey all week? Not true… someone on my facebook page seemed legitimately concerned! ha)

On our menu it’s actually called the Pumpkinseed and Herb Salad, but otherwise referred to by me as my favorite breakfast salad. I wake up craving this salad. And yes, it’s meant to fix me. I started eating this specific green mix because I was told that I probably need more of the sexy mineral zinc in my system, among other things. I haven’t been feeling well (at all) so this salad is part of my healing plan. My books are all about how raw food makes you feel amazing. I used to feel amazing. Why do I now feel like shit? And how can I admit that? (Doing it now). More on the healing plan as soon as I can find more time to write about it. Back to zinc. Pumpkinseeds happen to be very high in zinc. And so my love affair with pumpkinseeds has been rekindled.

Years ago in another (not raw) restaurant, I put a pumpkinseed salad on the menu: lolo rosso and red oak lettuces, shaved bosc pear, shaved pecorino, toasted salted pumpkinseeds and pumpkinseed lemon dressing. While I love delicate fluffy greens like lolo rosso and red oak, what I really can’t get enough of are kale and herbs. I could eat bathtubs of kale.

So, I started making myself this salad at the restaurant. Kale plus a bunch of parsley leaves, cilantro leaves, and torn mint leaves. Add hempseeds (full of omega-3’s… good for so many reasons!). Then toss the whole thing in a dressing made of pumpkinseed oil and lemon juice, and plenty of salt (ideally Himalayan crystal salt). You can also use a mix of olive (or other) oil with the pumpkinseed oil since the flavor is strong, and good quality raw organic pumpkinseed oil happens to be super expensive.  (ours comes from Austria, raw and organic). I love maxium pumpkinseed flavor so I use just that oil and lemon (and salt). Top this green pile with a handful of pumpkinseed macadamia parmesan.

How and where do you get pumpkinseed macadamia parmesan? Or make it? In Raw Food Real World (page 285) there’s a recipe for pine nut parmesan, and we make it (or a version of it) at the restaurant. It’s really easy, but you need a dehydrator. The recipe in the book , as titled, calls for pine nuts, but since those recently became more expensive than gold,

we’ve had to tweak this recipe, as well as a few others that previously featured golden pine nuts. Including the pine nut ricotta in our lasagna. After trying a few different variations, we found that mixing pumpkinseeds and macadamia nuts makes the best substitute. Using all of one or the other is okay, but a mix of the two we liked best. If you want to make your own parmesan, soak raw pumpkinseeds and macadamia nuts for a few hours. Add to a food processor with some water, lemon juice, nutritional yeast, and salt. Dehydrate till dry and crisp. YUM. If you’re too lazy or busy or otherwise unprepared to Continue reading ‘FIX ME PUMPKINSEED SALAD’

Why? Why why why…? It was October 5^th, about two weeks ago, I was at the gym, on the treadmill. Loud music blasting in my iPod earphones, CNN on the screen in front of me, both meant to distract me from dwelling on the fact that I’m running on a conveyor belt alongside other people running on conveyor belts. Then I saw it. An image on the TV screen of the cover of the latest issue of Gourmet magazine, and the printed headline, “Gourmet magazine closes after 70 years.” WHAT!? No Way! How is that possible? I’m frantically looking around, for… what… ? I think I was expecting others must have seen this headline and also stopped running out of shock and disbelief, like me. I was thinking I’d see people hugging, comforting one another over the news, shaking their heads. But no, I only saw people still running, pedaling, and the usual sea of heads bobbing up and down in the elliptical section.

I couldn’t keep going. I had to know what happened, so I ran home and checked online and yes, indeed, Conde Nast was shutting down Gourmet. Along with 3 other titles: a cookie magazine and two bridal magazines. I don’t get it. Isn’t there another silly magazine they could shut down? How about Golf World or Golf Digest? Does the world really need both? (or either?) Immediately I emailed my Mom, my Stepmom, and chef Neal, among others, like “OMG, did you hear???” They too were saddened. I wanted to call people and talk about it. I wanted to pull out a bottle of good wine and sit on the floor with all my old issues spread out around me, flipping through them and getting drunk and nostalgic.

I wanted to grieve. I wanted to be around people who understood and were similarly bummed out. I felt like there should be a huge and grand memorial service. Ruth Reichl (the editor) would get up and speak, past editors would get up and speak. All the food world would be there, dressed in dark clothes, and easels everywhere with giant cover images. Then everyone would drink really really good wine, and eat lots of beautiful food, and feel the comfort of communal mourning. Maybe there was such a service and I just wasn’t invited.

Anyway. I was reminded of all of this earlier today as I flipped through my copy of Bon Appetit, Conde Nast’s other food publication that was chosen over Gourmet to live on. The close up photos inside looked gory, the bulky font headlines over them cartoonish, and the dishes simple and uninspiring. Even the lighting on the styled photos looked weird and shadowy. The headlines were: “Entertaining Do’s and Don’ts”, “Party Desserts”, “Healthy Holiday Foods”, “68 Recipes to Mix & Match” and “Leftovers Done Right!” with the boring November issue glossy turkey cover, and “Thanksgiving Made Easy!” across the top. Thanksgiving isn’t supposed to be easy! You’re supposed to labor, with love.

Gourmet was beautiful and classy. It was only a few days before the fateful announcement that I read what I would never have suspected was my last issue. I even thought to myself I was going to call and double back up on my subscription like I did years ago. This way, I can tear out pages in one copy, and keep the other untouched, for my collection. Did I mention I have every single issue filed away going back through 1997? That’s 12 years. I used to have a few more years before that but I recall a very painful and reluctant purging of a couple piles a long time ago. One day I’m going to get the covers scanned and copied and will wallpaper a kitchen hallway with them. Or something like that. Every cover was a work of art, with more pages of art inside. Vegan or not, I was particularly struck by the photos on p. 102/103 of pork chops. “Pork chop” just sounds vulgar. But the photo on page 103 is a work of art. If you get obsessed about color like I do, you’d understand. The pink of the inside of the meat, the mossy dark green backdrop, the burgundy wine… I want to go back to all these pages when I’m picking colors for packaging labels, for furniture fabrics, for clothing I want to design, for whatever I’m putting together, in my Martha Stewart-esque creative fantasy land.

Going almost all raw vegan six years ago did nothing to lessen my appreciation for the pages of this magazine. It’s very much a celebration of the art and elegance of food, restaurants, and cooking. But it’s also been more thoughtful than that. In the August 2004 summer issue (with the sexy cover photo of blackberry jam in a glass jar with a wooden spoon) the editor bravely published an article which infuriated many of the magazine’s readers. It was called “Consider the Lobster” written by the famous writer David Foster Wallace (known for novels, short stories, and essays, not food writing, who also, btw, killed himself about a year ago…L). They sent him to report on the 56^th annual Maine Lobster Festival (where “something over 25,000 pounds of fresh-caught Maine lobster is consumed’). She published his entire essay without editing a word. It’s really long and full of digressions and lengthy footnotes. But as Ruth Reichl points out in her Editor’s Letter, “it is hilarious, thought-provoking, very uncomfortable—and something you’re not likely to forget anytime soon.”

With all of its funny details, Wallace makes you feel like you’re there with him. His comments on his discomfort with mass tourism (specifically in footnote 6) are particularly sobering given that he took his own life a few years later. Why is introspection such torture? In the spirit of Wallace’s many digressions, I’m totally digressing here to include a link to a thoroughly beautiful speech given on an overlapping and entirely relevant issue by the writer Elizabeth Gilbert. You can see it here. It’s 20 minutes. Well worth it. Believe me, I have no patience for youtube crap, but this is the opposite. From the TED series, I was referred to this talk by my friend, champion, and hero, Seth Godin. Watch it. Especially if you’ve ever felt tormented by the creative process, whether writing, creating art or music, science, or building a business.

Back to lobsters. Where was I. OK, so part way through this incredibly engaging article, Wallace puts forth what seemed to him in this context an unavoidable question:

“Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? A related set of concerns: Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental? What does ‘all right’ even mean in this context? Is it all just a matter of individual choice?”

Gourmet magazine has been around for almost twice as long as I have, so I haven’t read all the issues, but I’m guessing this is the first time this sort of question was raised in its pages. In a corresponding footnote he points out:

“Similar reasoning underlies the practice of what’s termed ‘debeaking’ broiler chickens and brood hens in modern factory farms. Maximum commercial efficiency requires that enormous poultry populations be confined in unnaturally close quarters, under which conditions many birds go crazy and peck one another to death. As a purely observational side-note, be apprised that debeaking is usually an automated process and that the chickens receive no anesthetic. It’s not clear to me whether most Gourmet readers know about debeaking, or about related practices like dehorning cattle in commercial feedlots, cropping swine’s tails in factory hog farms to keep psychotically bored neighbors from chewing them off, and so forth. It so happens that your assigned correspondent knew almost nothing about standard meat-industry operations before starting work on this article.”

The article is so good that it’s really hard not to quote the entire thing. He’s taking you along with him as he learns a bunch of new stuff himself. In another paragraph he points out:

“The more important point here, though, is that the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue is not just complex, it’s also uncomfortable. It is, at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and for just about everyone I know who enjoys a variety of foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling. As far as I can tell, my own main way of dealing with this conflict has been to avoid thinking about the whole unpleasant thing. I should add that it appears to me unlikely that many readers of Gourmet wish to think hard about it, either, or to be queried about the morality of their eating habits in the pages of a culinary monthly. Since, however, the assigned subject of this article is what it was like to attend the 2003 MLF, and thus to spend several days in the midst of a great mass of Americans all eating lobster, and thus to be more or less impelled to think hard about lobster and the experience of buying and eating lobster, it turns out that there is no honest way to avoid certain moral questions.”

He goes on investigating these questions incredibly thoroughly and thoughtfully, without judgment. I love that the whole thing is without judgment and very personal. You rarely learn so much about the author in a food magazine article. Anyway. He says,

“I’m not trying to give you a PETA-like screed here—at least I don’t think so. I’m trying, rather, to work out and articulate some of the troubling questions that arise amid all the laughter and salutation and community pride of the Maine Lobster Festival. The truth is that if you, the Festival attendee, permit yourself to think that lobsters can suffer and would rather not, the MLF can begin to take on aspects of something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest.”

And finally, his conclusion isn’t conclusive, just more thoughtful questions:

“Given this article’s venue and my own lack of culinary sophistication, I’m curious about whether the reader can identify with any of these reactions and acknowledgments and discomforts. I am also concerned not to come off as shrill or preachy when what I really am is confused. …  Is their refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is it just that they don’t want to think about it? Do they ever think about their reluctance to think about it? After all, isn’t being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet? Or is all the gourmet’s extra attention and sensibility just supposed to be aesthetic, gustatory?”

I love love love this essay. And I love Ruth Reichl even more than I did before for printing it. Many readers were furious and cancelled their subscriptions after this article appeared. Which I think is ridiculous. He put forth incredibly relevant (an understatement) questions for people to think about. After all, didn’t I just wax on in the above paragraphs about the beautiful photo of pork chops? Admiring the aesthetics of the photo vs. the content—the artfulness of it rather than the reality that it’s a photograph of a slice of a cooked slab of dead pig?

Watching those nature shows on TV where the lioness attacks and kills the gazelle—I can’t help feeling sad for the poor gazelle, the one of the herd that gets caught and taken down. But the gazelle wasn’t trapped, restrained, de-beaked (if it had a beak—you know what I’m getting at), demeaned, injected with hormones and antibiotics, fed a bunch of crap, or forced to walk a plank and watch a bunch of gazelles before it get unceremoniously and thoughtlessly slain before its turn to die. Was the pig in the photo? I don’t know. I could go on and on thinking these things through.

I loved this article when I first read it in 2004 and I love it now. It’s much easier to read, by the way, if you click on the “print” icon and print the whole thing, 11 pages of paper consumed and all. Easier to read the footnotes that way, and then you can pass it along to someone who might not read it online. Like your grandma. While you’re at it, click on the link to the related articles and you’ll find quite a bit on Food Politics, such as “A View to a Kill” which investigates America’s chicken industry and more humane ways to raise and kill chickens. This one doesn’t even compare to the amazingness that is the lobster article, but again I was cheering Gourmet for printing it and others like it—for raising these questions to its readers.

Despite all the questions in my own mind, I still love the photography and overall beauty and spirit of this now defunct food magazine. I just realized if you flip back a few pages from the pork picture I was admiring so much, there’s a beautiful full page photo of the featured chef holding a lamb, but he’s not in a chef coat and he’s not proudly posing with his prey. He’s holding the lamb like you’d hold a kitten and kissing its forehead. And opposite the pork beauty shot is a quarter page black and white of a pig. These are stunning shots, and their inclusion in the magazine acknowledges that the food in the photos come from these beautiful creatures. Which reminds me… if you’ve been to my restaurant Pure Food and Wine, then you’ve probably noticed the three different photographs on one wall of a very spirited looking duck. I found this photo before the restaurant opened in another 2004 issue of Gourmet. What struck me about it was how the duck was looking right into the camera with an almost feisty sort of look in his eye. I was in love with that photograph (and tracked down the photographer to get it). Little did I know that photo would inspire the name of my company a year later.

I will miss this magazine. The pages of Gourmet will always be inspiring to me.